Originally published at: https://appletalk.com.au/2019/02/thursday-morning-news210219/
We haven’t heard all that much about Marzipan since it was released, but today Bloomberg speculates that Apple may use the framework to combine Mac, iPad, and iPhone apps by 2021. You can see the appeal, both for developers and for Apple: by allowing developers to create apps that run across each of Apple’s hardware platforms, it will hopefully allow for developers to write code once, encouraging a broader variety of software on the Mac, iPhone, and iPad. There are still a number of technical hurdles to make this a reality, but with Apple potentially moving Macs to ARM in around the same timeframe, perhaps this is all closer than we think.
Earlier this week, Ming-Chi Kuo said that Apple were working on a 16 to 16.5-inch MacBook Pro with an all-new design. There’s no way to know what the "all new design" part means, but the possibilities are exciting. Could we see a MacBook Pro with even thinner bezels, or rounded corners on its display like recent iPhones and the iPad Pro? What about the Touch Bar and keyboard — will Apple change it up from what we’ve seen in the last few years, or will they stick to their guns, doubling down on the butterfly keyboard? I don’t think there’s anything particularly wrong with the current design, but it’s perhaps a little too divisive for something that should be borderline boring.
We’re also due for a preview of Apple’s upcoming Mac Pro this year, and rumour has it that Apple are considering showing off the modular, easy-to-upgrade Mac Pro at WWDC in June. It makes sense; developers are going to be a large part of the Mac Pro market, so it’s at least on theme, and hopefully we’ll be able to buy it before the end of the year.
The third beta of iOS 12.2 has been released to developers and members of Apple’s public beta program. This release has a number of visible changes from previous betas, covered by MacRumors as a darker interface for the Apple TV Remote feature, minor layout changes to the About screen in Settings, a fix for Group FaceTime (which was broken on iOS 12.2 beta 2), and more.
Meanwhile, watchOS 5.2 will bring new Hermès watch faces to the Apple Watch Series 4 Hermès. A nice little bonus for those with the Hermès Apple Watch models, but probably nothing that can’t be accomplished with a few custom watch faces of your own.
There are reports of an audio glitching bug affecting all Macs with Apple’s T2 security chip. The iMac Pro, 2018 Mac mini, 2018 MacBook Air, and 2018 MacBook Pro are all affected, with the issue seeming to stem from the T2 chip attempting to perform a time sync operation, overloading the USB bus and causing dropouts and glitches in any audio streams. Turning off time and location syncing helps, but the only real workaround right now is to have affected users buy an external Thunderbolt hub, and plug their USB audio devices into that, which will have its own separate USB bus.
The Sweet Setup says the best GTD app for the Apple Watch is Things. I’m not really surprised — ever since the iPhone was released Things has been getting things done with a carefully crafted interface. While the high price of entry may be its own GTD strategy in and of itself, Todoist and Google Keep are also now available on Apple Watch.
The Verge tells us about the Keychron K1, a low-profile wireless mechanical keyboard designed specifically for the Mac. It might as well be a unicorn in that regard, given that wireless mechanical keyboards are uncommon, low-profile ones even less so, but unfortunately, it’s let down by some simple execution mistakes that give us hope that someday, someone will get wireless mechanical keyboards right.
Over at Six Colors, Jason Snell has notes on podcasting from an iPad Pro for a week. Yes, a little extra hardware was needed, but with basically the same end result as podcasting on a Mac, the iPad Pro turns out to be a pretty capable podcasting machine.
Four new Apple videos continue their iPhone photography series, this time showing us how to choose a key photo, shoot with Depth Control and Stage Light Mono, and how to search for photos.
